This is a very good piece of critical writing in examining the model of governance for online politics and participation.

The trend toward reappraisal of China comes after hard years for democracy enthusiasts: Iraq and Afghanistan; Hamas’s election; the disappointment of many of Europe’s colored revolutions; persistent repression in Iran and Myanmar; an economic crisis that free societies were unable to prevent and unravel; growing sclerosis in the U.S. political system; and China’s extraordinary success, despite what Westerners have often regarded as a political system incompatible with success.

The question the reappraisers seem to be asking is whether their belief in bottom-up, spontaneously ordering, self-regulating societies blinded them to other truths (as their enthusiasm for China risks blinding them to the cruelty and violence of autocracy). They are asking: Can openness go too far? Can public opinion be measured too frequently? Can free speech sow disorder? Is the crowd really smarter than the experts? Can transparency hamper governance?

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In a recent essay in The New Republic, the liberal legal scholar Lawrence Lessig lashed out at “the tyranny of transparency,” criticizing a movement for digitally enabled openness in government that is popular with his liberal colleagues and at present holds much sway in Washington. But Mr. Lessig argued that efforts to require legislators to post schedules online and to map votes against campaign donations, to cite two examples, can leave “a suggestion of a sin” and deprive legislators of breathing room to conduct their work, while eroding the public trust that disclosure was meant to bolster.

At the same time, the just-ask-the-crowd fervor of recent years — reflected in the ascendancy of blogs, citizen journalism, the “Idol” contest votes, Wikipedia, open-source software — appears to be cooling.

via Currents – Challenging the Limits of Open Society – NYTimes.com.

Scholars have debated over the pros and cons of the adoption and advancement of the internet and online social networking tools. Yet, the value of the technologies themselves are largely shaped by the politics around them.

Displeased that a statue of a 10-year-old Barack Obama was installed in a park here, Indonesians took their protest not to this capital’s most famous traffic circle but to Facebook. More than 56,000 online protesters later, city officials gave in to arguments that the park should be reserved to honor an Indonesian.

Thanks to relatively cheap cellphones that offer Internet access, Facebook, Twitter and local social networking media have rapidly spread from cities to villages throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines. In a little over a year, the number of Indonesian Facebook users has skyrocketed to more than 21 million from fewer than a million — the world’s third largest number of Facebook users.

With tens of millions of people now instantly connected, social networking has quickly become a potent, though sometimes unpredictable, political force.

Protests on Facebook and other sites successfully backed leaders of this country’s main anticorruption agency who, in a long-running feud against the national police and the attorney general’s office, had apparently been set up and arrested on false charges. The online anger prompted President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to intercede; the police and the attorney general’s office, considered among the country’s most corrupt institutions, dropped the case and released the officials in November.

via Debate on Internet’s Limits Grows in Indonesia – NYTimes.com.